Curbing guns, but not too much

ON APRIL 16th last year a deranged student, Cho Seung-hui, killed 32 people before shooting himself at Virginia Tech university. He had legally acquired the two handguns he used that morning. Before his rampage on the campus, which spreads over the rolling hills of Blacksburg, teachers and university police were already worried about his volatile behaviour and violent writings. He was recommended for psychiatric treatment but, because of cracks in the state mental-health system, never received it.
Virginia's rush to reform has been dramatic but incomplete. At the urging of the state's governor, Timothy Kaine, the legislature has funnelled an extra $42m into mental-health treatment and staff. Virginia has also rewritten its laws for identifying and monitoring the mentally ill. One new law requires colleges to alert the parents of students who may be a danger to themselves or to others. And the state now requires mental-health questions on the instant-background checks for gun-buyers. These might have kept firearms out of Cho's hands.

People With Mental Illness Target of New Gun Law

Supporters of a new gun-control law claim it might have prevented the deaths of 32 people last year in a massacre at Virginia Tech carried out by a student who was mentally ill. Some psychiatrists, however, say the law falls short as a meaningful way to reduce gun violence.
The debate stems from President George W. Bush's signing of a measure in January intended to prevent people with serious mental illness from buying guns.
The legislation (HR 2640), sponsored by Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.), authorizes up to $1.3 billion in state grants to improve the tracking and reporting of individuals who are legally barred from gun purchases, including those involuntarily confined to a psychiatric hospital. (McCarthy's husband was killed by a mentally ill gunman who went on a rampage on a suburban commuter train 14 years ago.)
Paul Appelbaum, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and chair of APA's Council on Psychiatry and Law, said that a fully funded Virginia background check that looked for involuntary psychiatric care before the gun sales to the Tech shooter and the reporting of his outpatient care by state officials might have kept him from buying his weapons. "But he could have easily gotten them through other means," such as private sales and gun-show sales, which are unregulated by the background-check system, said Appelbaum, a former APA president.

State Response to Virginia Tech Shootings

A bill passed by the [Virginia] House Courts of Justice Committee would ensure that those who have been ordered to seek treatment are monitored by mental health workers. Seung Hui Cho, the gunman who shot and killed 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech in April before killing himself, was ordered into treatment in 2005, but the local mental health agency never followed up. . . . Currently, people must be deemed an "imminent danger" to be hospitalized against their will. Under Howell's bill and a similar one advanced by a House committee last week, there must be a "substantial likelihood" that a person would cause "serious physical harm to himself" in the near future or could "suffer serious harm due to substantial deterioration."